


living myths

by bam_cassiopeia



Series: empyrean microcosms [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Dark, Body Horror, Don't copy to another site, Eldritch, Gen, Horror, Lovecraftian, The Dark Side of the Force, The Force, but not really there's only one side of the force here and it's the eldritch one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-09
Updated: 2019-10-09
Packaged: 2020-11-28 05:29:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20961248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bam_cassiopeia/pseuds/bam_cassiopeia
Summary: Looking back, she will find it was always there: bright darkness at the core of her, hotter than even the sun-beaten sands of Jakku at mid-day – part of her, and yet apart.





	living myths

Looking back, she will find it was always there: bright darkness at the core of her, hotter than even the sun-beaten sands of Jakku at mid-day – part of her, and yet apart. Something years-dormant, patiently waiting to be awakened just as she waited for a family that would never come.

On a remote island on a remote planet in a remote stretch of the Core, she asks a living myth for help: “Something inside me has always been there. But now it’s awake, and I’m afraid.”

The last of the Jedi makes an angry sound. “You should be,” he snaps, and turns his back on her.

The texts of the Jedi of old speak of avatarisation, of becoming something more than flesh and blood, of changes taking place beyond the physical realm. C-3PO translates, stopping here and there to have conversations with himself on connotations and multiple meanings, concepts and contexts. Rey records translations and tangents, letting him talk and talk. It’s only when he’s done that she asks her questions.

She listens to her recordings, again and again, but for all she learns, she still doesn’t know what is happening to her.

Heat surrounds her, always, and the sweet smell of warm sand, like she carries a piece of desert everywhere (and sometimes, but only sometimes, the air grows cold around her – as it does when night falls upon the desert, ready to take you if you’re not careful). It’s not the only sign, but it’s the first.

Warmth only, at the beginning – warmth in an ice-cold cell, rushing through her veins and with it the metallic taste of power as she denies a monster, something with a young, earnest face, glowing in the darkness, offset by empty voids for eyes. The warmth stays with her as the monster stalks away, defeated, taking the cold with him; it stays with her as she orders a faceless man in white to lay down his weapon, as she flees and as she’s found by the boy who disrupted her life – Finn, who’s so worried for her it breaks her heart and rebuilds it in the span of seconds.

When that boy falls to the monster on the snow-covered, gutted planet with its forest of dark trees, snow starts steaming under her feet as she fights. And afterward, the warmth stays. It stays, and it grows, enough that people feel it even she doesn’t use the Force.

(She wonders if it will keep growing, that heat, grow enough for true deserts to spread around her, and sometimes, she thinks she’d rather die.)

Warmth is the first symptom, and it doesn’t seem so bad, until it does. Leia – Leia who is surrounded by ghosts and pain, with the Force she makes little use of coiled around her, pure power that makes her impossible to ignore and hard to contradict, Leia who smiles kindly and means it, who is friendly and understanding and unyieldingly hard – Leia tells Rey there is a darkness around her, waiting, always waiting.

“That’s how Luke was,” she says, her sorrow palpable, almost choking. “So _bright_, and always surrounded by darkness.”

(For all the light of the desert, light that, at the wrong hours, could burn unprotected eyes, Rey spent much of her life in darkness – the darkness of the place she called home, the darkness of the ruins she scavenged, the darkness every Jakku building she’d set foot in aimed at. Darkness was a respite, or it had been, and it was hard to forget, and harder to fear.)

Luke – Luke who smells like blood and a storm waiting to happen, whose footsteps leave too deep an imprint for a man of his size, who acts like the desert spirits who’d teach daring, stupid children in the stories told by Jakku elders, Luke who _looked _human: older than his years, worn around the edges, but with an eerie glow behind his pale eyes – Luke tells her it’s different for everyone, stronger for some, that she can’t hide it, and that the more she’ll grow within her power, the more it will grow within her.

“The Force will cost you if you pursue it,” he tells her, scowling. His voice sounds like pain, like death.

And yet, using the Force feels _right_; like she is doing what she is supposed to be doing, like it couldn’t have happened another way. Like she is an instrument of fate, of destiny – of the Force itself, maybe. Luke Skywalker tells her to reject the feeling. Kylo Ren, the monster who’s not so different from her, tells her to embrace it.

(At night, in her blessedly private bunk on the Falcon, she watches her bones glow dark under layers and layers of flesh. She thinks: _in ten, twenty, thirty years, maybe more, I’ll be a dark, hot star, collapsing on myself. I will scream and scream and there will be no end in sight._

She also thinks: _that’s a bit dramatic, isn’t it?_

And: _it’ll be worth it, if I find my own way_.)

**Author's Note:**

> [prompted.](https://and-then-bam-cassiopeia.tumblr.com/post/178568061004/drabble-prompt-rey-centric-where-forceusers-turn)  
"Rey-centric where forceusers turn more and more eldritch the bigger their connection with the force. Possible Reylo subtext"


End file.
